"No question about it," the doctor blustered. "The only chance the idiot woman has—"
Brenton interrupted.
"She is my wife," he reminded the doctor.
"I don't care if she is your wife, twenty times over," Doctor Keltridge said vehemently. "We both know the infernal thing that she has done."
"But, if she believed it was right—" Brenton was beginning faintly.
The doctor bore him down.
"Because she is a semi-maniac, she's not to be encouraged in her destruction of the human race," he argued hotly. Then, as he saw the tightening and the whitening of Brenton's lips, he forgot his argument in swift contrition. "Damn it all, Brenton! I vowed I'd never mention the thing to you again, as long as I lived, and here I am again, off on the same old subject. I'm a garrulous old man; but——" his keen face softened, puckered into a score of wrinkles; "but I loved that baby boy. I brought him into the world, and I had spent no small amount of time congratulating myself upon the fact that you'd got him, at any rate; that you'd have him for a comforting little peg to hang your spiritual hat on, when you came home from preaching the gospel to a disgruntled and disgruntling world. Almost I think I felt his death more than—"
"Not more than I." Brenton faced him steadily.
"Not in one sense. And yet, I did feel it more, because, from the first, I saw how needless it would be."
But Brenton lifted up his hand.